I've been tinkering as well disabling packages. So far I've only disabled those listed in pink as they are tagged as bloatware. Any other recommendations?

I went full on.. and disabled a lot of stuff and notcied that the Android OS process was having sleep issues. Once I renabled the packages and disabled only the most obvious things settled down..so I'll suggest to use caution and take it slow!

If you disable something that is essential, you can easily enable it again. It's not like rooting.

Not necessarily. One time I accidentally disabled an important system app, that resulted in my phone getting stuck in an unrecoverable boot loop. Since I couldn't boot there was no way to enable that app again. The only thing I could do was was boot into recovery and do a factory reset.